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Thoughts on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
It’s wrong. It’s an act of Russian aggression that will result in thousands of both Russian and Ukrainian lives lost over the insanity of one man, Vladimir Putin. I was completely shocked, though not surprised, when I read the news saying that Russia has formally declared war and is invading...
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Performing NAL Transplants to Recover Corrupted Media
This writeup is also readable on my GitHub repository and team website. Last December, I had a lot of fun competing at X-Mas CTF 2022 hosted by Hecării, Țuica și Păunii with my team IrisSec. We ranked 2nd place out of 982 teams globally. HTsP really knows how to throw...
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How I Hacked a Network to Get Some Sleep
I had some trouble sleeping last night, so I hacked the network and networking infrastructure set up by the property management company that owns the house I’m renting. In doing so, I realized that since all the houses in my neighborhood are the same, I could hypothetically hack any network...
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No Post This Week
There will be no post this week. I’ve been going through a rough patch and could not find the mental capacity to write a post. Best regards.
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Backlogged and Stressed
I’ve been really stressed out lately. My mental well-being has admittedly not been the greatest these past few weeks, and it’s been a bit of a struggle to get myself out of this ditch. A lot of the posts that I’ve been planning have been in limbo with little or...
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Writing a DNS Resolver From Scratch (Part 1)
EDIT: I’ve discontinued this series because I’ve frankly just lost interest and am focused on other things. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read “An Introduction to DNS” and “Writing Sub-Byte Data in C” before continuing. DNS was first described in RFC 882, 883, and 973, and the...
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Writing Sub-Byte Data in C
When programming, I often find it necessary to write sub-byte data (raw bits), yet most languages unfortunately fall short of this capability. It’s actually incredibly easy to accomplish the same goal in just about any language using either math or bitwise operations, and I’ll use C to demonstrate this. This...
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An Introduction to DNS
The Domain Name System (DNS) is an application-layer protocol that translates domain names to IP addresses. It’s an extremely important protocol for regular network operations, so much so that we IT folk have a common saying whenever something goes wrong: “It’s always DNS.” It’s often described as the “phonebook” of...
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Looking Back Before Looking Forward
I guess this is going to be my last blog post of 2021. It’s been a rough and busy year, and this blog has honestly been consistently something that I’ve looked forward to writing on every single week. Although it originally started – and was intended – as primarily technical...
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To Be Home
Home is not where you’re from – it’s where you’re supposed to be. I’m currently visiting the family for the holidays and honestly, I’m homesick. It’s been the single defining emotion I’ve felt during my stay thus far in the house I grew up in: homesickness. I’m not visiting home...
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The Autumn Leaves Depart
Well I can’t believe it came so fast, but here it is: the end of yet another semester of college. It’s been a tough semester and it’s definitely been an experimental term with the return to in-person instruction. New faces, new friends, new commitments, and new missions. I had two...
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The Importance of Adversity
When I was 17 – 17 years old – I was the victim of a hit-and-run vehicle-pedestrian collision. I suffered severe traumatic injuries and it would not be hyperbolic to say that I got a glimpse of death. It was terrible… but it was important, and it was necessary. I...
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An Open Invitation to Question
Hey, reader. I’d like to invite you to something. It’s something really important to me, and it means a lot to me. It’s something that I think more people should do, and it would be awesome if you could take me up on my invitation! I’d like to invite you...
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Gratitude
Given that it’s Thanksgiving, it’s fitting that post is about gratitude. Specifically, gratitude for scientists, researchers, and engineers; gratitude for teachers; gratitude for those who inspire others to take it upon themselves and do; and gratitude for those who are themselves doers. I’d like to give special recognition to my...
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Why Your Philosophy to Programming Sucks
I recently got mad. Like, genuinely mad. If you know me, you know that’s a rarity. I got mad because I was arguing with another programmer about a project we were working on, and I found out that they had a seriously corrupted philosophy on programming. My current main focus...
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Can Anybody Hear Me?
This week, I unfortunately came down with a bad case of severe burnout. It’s my own fault, ultimately, for not having kept my work-life-school-organizations balance in check, the 10-50-20-30 that I let become 20-0-30-50 due to – frankly – negligence. I spent all weekend studying for my Operating Systems midterm...